Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Heather hurried to the window and peered out but she had a poor view.

‘Is it his car?’ said Marilyn. ‘Has there been an accident?’

Heather, with her face close to the cold pane, looking at the broken driver’s side window and the glass on the ground, said, ‘No, it’s yours.’

She was looking for Nina, who must have got out of her bed and squeezed her skinny body through those narrow upstairs windows, shinning, she supposed, down a drainpipe or a tree so as to throw a rock through the window of Marilyn’s car. She was worried about the girl, about small, bare feet on all that broken glass. She was worried about her being so close to the dark road. She was worried about her running away in her nightie, about flashers and stories of missing girls. She could not see anyone out there.

Marilyn, still in the doorway, went not to the window but to the front door. She turned the handle but found the door locked. Heather, coming to join her, tried the locked door too.

‘It isn’t Nina,’ said Marilyn.

‘How do you know?’ She had not been able to see who it was, from the living room window, through this solid door. She did not see how Marilyn could know that.

There was a sudden din then from outside, a banging of metal on metal. Heather returned to the living room window, staring out again, seeing slashed tyres, seeing clearly now the attack on Marilyn’s car, whose bonnet was open, whose engine was being ruined.

‘It isn’t Nina,’ repeated Marilyn.

‘No,’ said Heather, coming back to stand with Marilyn at the door. ‘It’s him.’

‘I mean,’ said Marilyn, ‘the girl in Nina’s bed. It isn’t Nina.’

The dishwasher went on in the kitchen and Heather turned around. Kath was standing at the end of the hallway; and at the top of the stairs, in her bedroom doorway, was the girl who was not Nina — and Heather, in that moment, understood that the windows might be big enough to squeeze through but that they would not open.

They heard the key being turned in the front door lock.

They felt the cold night flooding in.

Pretty much everything around here is concrete — the secondary school, the pebble-dashed scout hut, the empty working men’s club. Nicola, walking home with her blazer off, steps over the gaps between the paving slabs, over the weeds which sprout there.

She is wishing away the remaining weeks of term, looking forward to the summer holidays. Her granddad says that these will be the happiest days of her life, but she doubts he knows what he is talking about. Nicola, who is almost sixteen, won’t be going back to school in the autumn.

Closer to home, the pavements are tarmacked. Every few metres, there is a tree. The roots have broken through the tarmac, and grass grows in the cracks. The trees must have been planted when the street was new but Nicola can’t help thinking of them as something belonging to the land on which the estate was built. The trees and the grass seem to her like survivors from the buried fields pushing through.

She is not old enough to remember the estate not being here. She can barely imagine the absence of these solid brick houses and the line of shops. The units at either end — not long ago a grocer’s and a newsagent’s which became an off-licence and then a video shop — are standing empty except for the unopened post, mostly junk mail, collecting behind their front doors. In between, her granddad’s sweet shop remains. Her granddad says that he is not going anywhere. Besides, this is where they live.

The paint on the window frames of her granddad’s shop is a sickly red like the liquorice laces and the cherry lips in the jars on the shelves. When the paint peels, her granddad strips it and then repaints it the same colour.

Each afternoon, when Nicola gets in from school, she helps out in the shop. She has only once failed to go straight home after school and she won’t be doing that again.

She goes in through the front. As she opens the door, the bell rings and her granddad looks up from his puzzle book. The locals come in to see her granddad as much as they do to buy sweets. They lean on the counter and chat. The shop is never busy anyway. The primary school used to be nearby and the shop got packed at home time — lots of little hands touching whatever wasn’t in a jar, fingering the two pence sweets displayed in a tray on the counter. But that school has been closed down now and the children go by bus to a bigger one near the new supermarket.

Nicola’s granddad quizzes her about her day and tells her about his before saying, ‘Right then, it’s all yours.’ He leaves her to mind the shop while he goes for a break, which means a cup of tea and a smoke and maybe a nap in his room.

She does think of it as his room now, as opposed to her grandparents’ room, although it is just as it used to be when her grandmother was alive. None of her grandmother’s things have been removed. The mystery she had been reading is still by the bed. Her slippers are still on the floor. Her clothes are still in her drawers and on her side of the wardrobe, spilling over to her granddad’s side, her dresses pressing up against his good, dark suit.

Nicola’s granddad does not allow Nicola to touch her grandmother’s possessions. She does though, while he is sleeping. There are things of her grandmother’s which Nicola would like to have. Amongst the clothes in the wardrobe, on a hanger in the dark, there is a dress from the fifties with a busy ivy pattern. It makes Nicola think of the inside of her granddad’s shed, the ivy growing through the walls and through the roof, through the planks. Nicola covets this dress, and the shoes which go with it. And she would like to be given what her grandmother called her crystal ball but which is really just hollow glass. Her grandmother used her crystal ball to read Nicola’s palm, telling her how many children she would have — the first one, she said, a year after marrying.

The late afternoon heat presses up against the window of the sweet shop, warming the glass and showing up all the little finger marks on the panes. Her granddad told her that glass is fluid, that over time a window will thicken at the base, imperceptibly swelling.

Nicola sits down on her granddad’s stool, slipping off her shoes, letting them fall to the floor, and undoing the button on the waist of her skirt. She feels tired. She would like to put her head down on the sugar-dusted counter and fall asleep. But the door is opening, the bell ringing, a customer entering. Some people are disappointed if they come in and see Nicola and not her granddad behind the counter, but one or two of them, she thinks, come in to see her. This man is one of her regulars.

He looks for a long time at the wall of jars in the window before choosing something off the top shelf. Today, he asks for liquorice. Nicola discreetly refastens her skirt before going to the front of the shop and climbing onto a step stool, reaching for the jar. She knows he is watching her. She can feel his eyes on her, perhaps on the two inches of knee revealed between the top of her knee-high socks and the hem of her skirt, perhaps on the curve of her stomach exposed when her shirt, which she has not tucked into her waistband, rides up as she lifts her arms. He lets her get the jar in both hands before he says, ‘Not those, the other sort.’ She puts the jar of liquorice laces back on the shelf, fetches down the one he wants and takes it to the counter. She weighs out his liquorice, pouring a quarter pound of it into the steel tray. It is the colour of black pudding.